Biography

In his historically informed teaching and scholarship, Professor David Faflik draws on the interpretive traditions of cultural history, book history, and cultural studies to assess the contradictory meanings of American modernity from the colonial period to the present. Much of his work to date has focused on the diverse expressions of US modernism as a literary phenomenon of the nineteenth century, with special attention paid to the antebellum period. Faflik’s most recent scholarship offers an even broader perspective on modern America’s complex cultural formations. In his book The Literary Gift in Early America (2025), Faflik not only demonstrates how print and manuscript objects circulated as “gifts” in the American literary economies of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries; he entertains the practical and conceptual implications of “movement” to literature’s wider distributional life cycles.

Professor Faflik’s work additionally addresses the interpretive affordances of play. As the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Studies of the United States at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), he researched and wrote That Futebol Feeling: Sport and Play in Brazil’s Heartland (2025), which considers the emotional components of the game of “soccer” as it’s played in Brazil’s second most populous state. Similar concerns inform Faflik’s forthcoming book Segregation Games: Boston, Busing, and the Making of Red Sox Nation, the first title from the University of Massachusetts Press’s Sport for Social Change series. Situated at the intersection of US cultural and social history, Segregation Games examines the surprising ties in 1970s Boston between the racial segregation of the city’s public schools and the racial controversies expressed on and off the playing field by Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox.